Won the First Place of Best Ph.D. Paper Award in the 5th IASTED
International Conference on Web-based Education (WBE) organized by
International Association of Science and Technology for Development in
Mexico in 2006

To facilitate teachers and students to exploit the myriad possibilities of using web resources to meet individual’s learning or teaching needs, in this paper, we present an architectural framework of Personalized Education System (PES). Central to the PES framework is the design and development of a Personalized Education Ontology (PEOnto) that facilitates the identification and discovery of relevant learning objects for individual needs. To this end, we propose PEOnto that consists of five interrelated educational ontologies, namely, the Curriculum Ontology, Subject domain (Language education) Ontology, Pedagogy Ontology, People Ontology, and Personalized Education Agents (PEA) Ontology. Together, these educational ontologies serve to address various PE scenarios and enable delivery of personalized educational services within the multi-agents based PES. We also present the design and development of a testbed, called Personalized Instructional Planning (PIP), for studying ways of integrating multiple ontologies for personalized search and study plan generation.